Learning Path #5: Facilitating Peer Learning in Offline Settings

How do we best take advantage of peer learning when we are together face to face offline? Here are a few ideas  of methods to facilitate peer learning.These are methods you could incorporate into a meeting  (rather than simply doing presentations and panels.) They all focus on interaction between peers, rather than simply the broadcast of content. If you are looking to try to engage people more deeply at a meeting, consider one of these approaches. For an even  larger list of ideas, see the "methods" page on the "KS Toolkit" - a wiki full of ideas about tools and methods for knowledge sharing. They all apply to peer learning! Much of the content on this page was based on pages from the Toolkit, which uses a Creative Commons License making it easy for other people to use and reuse the material. (Yes, another peer learning opportunity!)

Open Space

Open Space (also known as Open Space Technology or OST) is a method for convening groups around a specific question or task or importance and giving them responsibility for creating both their own agenda and experience. It is best used when at least a half to two full days are available. The facilitator's key task is to identify the question that brings people together, offer the simple process, then stand back and let participants do the work. The process is admirably described in a number of languages at http://www.openspaceworld.org .  Read more on our wiki page on Open Space Technology.

Peer Assists

A Peer Assist brings together a group of peers to elicit feedback on a problem, project, or activity, and draw lessons from the participants' knowledge and experience. To read more about it, check our Peer Assists page.



The World Cafe



Speed Geeking



Human Spectrogram

A group face to face exercise to help surface similarities and differences in a group, help people to get to know each other and to do something together that is active. For more on this great face to face warm up activity, see the Human Spectrogram page.